I don't really do guest posts, it's not a feature I love about blogs/newsletters, but today we do have a guest post, and so let me do a double introduction. Today's review is by my friend Charles Meeks, who holds a PhD in patristics and is recently ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada. Charles and I differ on some important theological issues (some of which you'll see in today's review), but enjoy robust engagement around theology and the Scriptures.
Today's book is Isaac B. Sharp, The Other Evangelicals: A Story of Liberal, Black, Progressive, Feminist, and Gay Christians—and the Movement That Pushed Them Out. It's a book that I myself had wanted to read but have not had the time or the money to get to. I think it's important to contextualise, especially for Australia readers, that American evangelicalism just is a different thing to Australian evangelicalism. It has a different history, different sociology, and at key points different theological markers. But what happens in America influences everywhere. Which is why it's necessary to understand it better.
Anyway, I am (as usual) at danger of saying too much, and I want to cede the floor and let Charles speak today.
My [Not So Objective] Review of Isaac B. Sharp, The Other Evangelicals: A Story of Liberal, Black, Progressive, Feminist, and Gay Christians—and the Movement That Pushed Them Out (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023), by Charles Meeks.
I’m tired.
Like, really, really tired.
I know this isn’t the way one usually begins a book review. Let me give you the inside-the-dust-jacket summary first.
Sharp was interviewed by Ansley Quiros on Anxious Bench last November, and very succinctly laid out his working thesis there: that contemporary prevalent stories about the rise of big-E Evangelicalism rightly describe how we arrived a generally Republican, white, nationalist, patriarchal, traditionalist form of Evangelicalism through the influence and control of a relatively small number of power brokers (people, organizations, etc.). Kristin Kobes Du Mez’ popular Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation covers this story well; and if you’re interested in Sharp’s book, it’s likely you’ve already investigated Du Mez’. But what these historical accounts do not describe is what has happened to the people not just not at the periphery of who is decided to “be” an evangelical or not, but people who were closer to the middle than we might think. These different groups feature in each chapter: liberals, Black evangelicals, progressives, feminists, and members of the LGBTQ community.
That’s a sneak-peak at what you’ll learn from the interview, from reading an Amazon description, or reading the back cover. Here’s the actual back-of-the-jacket summary: Don’t read this book if you’re perpetually angry at the state of Christianity in the Year of Our Lord Twenty-Twenty-Three. Don’t read this book if you’re still simmering in rage at how Christians could essentially support the rise and installation of Tr*mp. Don’t read this book if you’re a part of a marginalized evangelical community because you already know the story—you’ve lived it.
As a work of historiography, Sharp brings into focus not simply that certain people came to power in order to control the narrative of evangelicalism, not simply that people who disagreed with others on issues related to race, sex and gender, war, etc. eventually achieved the separation they wanted, nor simply that history continues to repeat itself. In such a small space allotted to him by the publisher, he’s able to dig a bit into the why and how.
Sharp also sets in stark relief a glaring question: why does the title “evangelical” matter at all? Is there more information which that moniker reveals? Historically, yes; and the history here is helpful, because initially “evangelical” told people you were somewhere between a Fundamentalist and a Liberal/Modernist. Why was it important to convey that? Well, it told people about your core convictions. The problem with traveling beyond the boundaries of larger labels like “Christian” or “agnostic,” or even “Baptist” or “Anglican,” is that there are simultaneously things you are saying about yourself, and things assumed about you. And the goal of every person, I imagine, is to have these two things coincide; you want to be known as you know yourself.
But, as Sharp reveals, evangelicals have completely failed at this task. Jump to the concluding chapter if you have the book in hand. Take a look at the polling done on who counts as an evangelical and who doesn’t, both by self-identification and by those who say that some who identify as evangelical aren’t really evangelicals because of x, y, z. The word has lost all meaning.
I love that Sharp includes Mark Labberton’s assessment of Evangelicalism from his introduction to Still Evangelical?, which is based on his keynote from a closed-door consultation of many evangelical leaders at Wheaton College in April 2016. Labberton served as Fuller Theological Seminary’s fifth president from 2013-2022, succeeding Richard Mouw. I’m honestly quite surprised at the content of Labberton’s appeal for understanding the dire state of Evangelicalism. You can read the version posted to Fuller’s website in 2018 if you wish.
Sharp doesn’t agree with all of Labberton’s assessments; that’s fine. But I want to share this bit from the Still Evangelical? introduction that Sharp quotes, because I think I wasted an entire highlighter ensuring I’ll never forget it: “Evangelicals can affirm that faith commitments and their implications are essential to discerning values; but when evangelicals who affirm the same baseline of faith reach radically opposing social and political opinions, we have to ask what else is at play.”[1] How is it, in other words, that we can read the same biblical text and come to vastly different conclusions? What else is at play includes “social locations, personal experience, and spiritual conviction.” Labberton pointed to four key issues where Evangelicalism was showing its true nature: its “complicated relationship to power,” its failure to admit the “historical responsibility and ongoing complicity of white evangelicals in the nation’s violent oppression of people of color,” its embracing of “an idolatrous kind of nationalism,” and its economic policies that ironically “prop up the wealthy and secure at the expense of the poor and the vulnerable” (Sharp 266–67). You can dislike phenomenology all you want, but you can’t ignore that there is a distinction between reading the text and interpreting the text. Seems like basic Bible-101 fodder, but you would be surprised how many scholars, pastors, theologians, etc. have forgotten that the places they learned to read also taught them how to interpret—often more implicitly than explicitly.
Ultimately, one of the fundamental divides that reappears throughout Sharp’s narrative that weighs most heavily on those who continue to embrace Evangelicalism and those who reject it is between those who read the Bible and are “radicalized” by it—in other words, they reevaluate their station in the world (whether it is their self-understanding or “class”, perhaps), or they form relationships with people who are marginalized, or they step outside their comfort zone and read something by a scholar with whom they previously disagreed—and those who read the Bible and draw the borders tighter. But the term “radicalized” isn’t itself a self-definition! It’s a label perhaps accepted now and transformed (much like “queer” has assumed a new status in LGBTQ circles), but it’s one given as a value-judgment by those who view themselves as being more firmly planted in the centre of God’s revelatory grace.
This is why I’m tired—because even though I can share fellowship with Christians across the globe (not just in North America!) who don’t read the Bible the same way I do, it feels like there will always be an us vs. them. Much like Martin Luther considered himself Catholic and John Wesley considered himself Anglican, with only a handful of exceptions most of the evangelicals mentioned by Sharp considered themselves evangelicals! I was questioned recently in an interview for a faculty position at a fairly well-known evangelical seminary why I considered myself evangelical if I wasn’t a member of the Evangelical Theological Society. As hard as folks like the ones in Sharp’s study—and myself!—have tried to remain centrist, we don’t hold the power to make that happen.
Sharp doesn't ask the sorts of divisive biblical-exegetical questions seemingly at the heart of the various debates that preoccupy Twitter threads and monographs. He's doing historiography, not biblical theology. But these are the questions that continue to be ubiquitous—and certainly at the forefront of my mind—because of where they land you. Do you cease being evangelical when you suggest that certain teachings are conditional to the original context, or are descriptive rather than prescriptive? It seems to me that being an evangelical, as defined by Evangelicalism, has more to do with one's earnest intentions regarding the normative nature of the text and extracting the core of the Good News. And yet, if you take the "wrong" parts of Scripture more seriously than the "right" parts, the open gate beckons your swift departure from the castle.
One of the reasons these questions continue to float in my mind is because I’ve found myself on the outside more than the inside lately when it comes to, for example, LGBTQ issues. If you look at my CV you’ll assume one thing about me; but when you realize I’ve just been ordained in one of the most left-leaning Anglican dioceses in Canada, you might be confused. How can someone who cares so deeply about Scripture, tradition, ecclesiology, sacramentology, the patristic tradition be affirming? Is it because I’m hell-bent on assimilating the pure truth of the Gospel with the evil advances of modern secular humanism? Because the water-tight case I put my King James Bible into was breached and soaked with progressive liberal tendencies?
I honestly don’t think so. I think it’s mainly because I’ve started to hear other interpretive traditions, because I’ve decided to engage in a willing suspension of disbelief on the bits of doctrine that I don’t think are core in order to embrace Jesus’ preferential care of the marginalized. I want to be very clear here: I don’t think this makes me “better” than evangelicals. There’s a lot of vitriol on the left, same as there is on the right, claiming that evangelicals are spineless patriarchalists obsessed with what people do in their bedrooms and bathrooms. Mainline denominations have overseen—in several nations, but here I’m thinking of my home country of Canada—some of the most evil programs in attempted social and cultural genocide.
I think a great many evangelicals just want to make sure they uphold the authority of Scripture in an age when people are becoming listless, fragmented by technology, and reliant solely on a subjective narrative. This is a very noble goal; but when this goal is achieved the way it has been attempted over the past 70ish years, and especially when Christian nationalism is a rising tide, then, well, I have a problem with the big-E. But the little-e remains core to my identity, no matter what others dictate.
Which is to say: you should read this book. You might find yourself in its pages.
[1] Mark Labberton, “Introduction,” in Still Evangelical?, ed. Mark Labberton (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018), 6.
Thank you for your thoughtful review.